


Zero and One

by frimfram



Category: The Authority
Genre: Bickering, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2019-04-29 05:07:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14465670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frimfram/pseuds/frimfram
Summary: Newly escaped from Henry Bendix, Apollo and the Midnighter face down a first night alone in the world -- besides each other.





	Zero and One

**Author's Note:**

> This is another old fic from about 2007, reposted without revision.

**Zero and One**

The need to sleep, they can cut out of you. That’s just tissue and circuits, electricity through meat. Nothing a scalpel and saw can’t fix. What they can’t do, whatever they slice out of you, whatever shit they stick up your brain, is make you bear a night in the desert. The way the heat in the air drops dead, so the oven you’ve been baking in is all at once a meat-locker. The way the moon’s blank stare creeps up your neck. The way things come alive in the black.

 

Our second night on earth is tearing up from the skyline and the sun’s bailing out without a fight. When it’s two inches off the horizon Apollo stops. I grit my teeth: he’s been slowing for an hour, since our shadows outgrew us and the muscles in his back started locking up one by one. That hour’s gone fast. They were all slow up til now, the hours that crawled past while Apollo threw up by the roadside and shook too hard to speak. This one, bringing nightfall, beat us to the punch. Apollo’s frowning, pointing at the skyline: there against the fat red sun a dust-cloud resolves itself into a truck.

 

We hit the ditch. Lie on our bellies in the shallow trench by the straight white road. A silver truck barrels past us: high up in the cab the driver is singing along to the radio, and never looks down. Our first human. Our first stop. Our first successful covert operation.

 

Apollo spits out dust: "When I build a top-secret military installation, it's going somewhere with transport links and tree cover." He reaches out to brush cooling sand off my coat and I can feel his fingers shaking. "And a washroom."

 

I flinch and stand. The air’s growing chill: I extend a hand to help Apollo up, and get a blank stare in return. He cracks out an I’m-a-superhero smile and makes to get up by himself -- misses his footing. Staggers. Lands on his ass in the dirt.

 

Dust leaps up around him. Horror makes his eyes wide.

 

I reach out again. “Your body’s been waiting nineteen hours for you to stop. You can’t cure shock by walking it off.”

 

Apollo gives me a look fit to make a Marine blush. “I’m fine.”

 

“You’re half-dead. Even  _ your _ body can only run on adrenaline for so long.” I jab a hand at the bleeding sunset. “And that doesn’t look great for you either.”

 

“I said I’m fine.” Apollo plants both palms against the dirt, pushes himself up. Color drains out of his face.

 

“Don’t argue. You can’t walk all night. You’ll drain yourself.” I squint at the horizon: the truck’s already Tonka-toy sized in the hazing distance. “We stop for the night, wait out the dawn.”

 

“We’re not stopping!” A muscle in Apollo’s jaw jumps. “We need to put more ground between us and the complex. If Bendix finds us – ”

 

“If Bendix finds us when you’re exhausted you’ll be dead in seconds. You may be team leader, but I know this crap.”

 

At the words ‘team leader’ the muscle stops still. Apollo turns to stone. Stares at me. Heat still crawls against my skin, but now my guts are cold. I tell him, “You throw up again, I’m not holding your hair.”

 

For three seconds the desert air shivers, then Apollo unfreezes. “You’re an asshole.” He folds his arms across his chest, and breathes.

 

“We stop,” I try again. “I’m tired anyway.”

 

“You don’t need to sleep.”

 

I grunt, hoping Apollo will take it as the conclusion of diplomatic niceties. And I head up off the road.

 

We stow ourselves in an outcropping that gives shelter from four sides – only the sky to worry about, and that I figure we’d better get used to. Apollo sits first, in spite of himself; I pace a few feet away and set down against the still-warm shoulder of a rock. My patience holds for three minutes before my brain starts up counting again, before I start feeling like I’ve got ants under my skin, watching the stars haze out of the dusk. Apollo slumps against the rock with his knees up, arms looped around them, and stares hard at a spot on the rockface opposite. Nothing’s there. I’m not leaving him in peace, I tell myself; I’m challenging him to speak first. Sunset drives a wall of shadow down the rock.

 

For an hour the growing dark is thick with sound: scales dragging over sand, screech-owl whistles dropping down, feral barks. Then the cold snaps shut its jaws, and there’s nothing. Silence. Nothing moves and nothing breathes. The desert petrifies under the moon and the white road glows, a raised spine. I stamp my feet and huff into my fisted hands. I remember – I think I remember – waking once with a black-gloved hand clamped fast across my face. The silence makes my eardrums ache.

 

At 02:04 a.m., his voice closer than I’d thought, Apollo speaks: “You could go.”

 

I squint across. He does not look himself by moonlight. “Was going to give you a straight ten for your sleep impersonation,” I tell him. “Now you’ve blown it.”

 

For a long moment it’s quiet.

 

“I hate carrying the damn conversation,” I say.

 

“I’m holding you back.” Apollo’s voice is low. He’s still leaning on the rock, head tilted back now, staring straight at the sky. “You’ll cover more ground travelling at night.”

 

I sit up from the freezing sand. “This from the man who can fly.”

 

Something like a smile. “I can’t … literally fly under the radar. Taking off… I might as well hang a big shiny sign around my neck. ‘Aim the heat-seeking missiles here.’” He  _ laughs _ , like the last guy left in the drunk tank.

 

“You’ve lost your mind,” I tell him.

 

He breathes out thickly. “Most of it.”

 

Forty seconds of silence.

 

I squint at him. “You’re quitting.”

 

He doesn’t even move.

 

I tug tight the strap on my left boot. “If you’re quitting, I  _ will _ go.”

 

“We don’t stand a chance,” he says. He tilts his face my way but doesn’t take his eyes off the stars. “You’ve got to see that. You’re the one with Intel Inside.”

 

“Yeah, well. I’m not giving the bastard the satisfaction.” I turn my back on him and stare up the road. The cold is blistering my lips, but it suits the machinery in my head: sets it calculating, calibrating, taking readings off the stars. The computer never leaves me quiet. Nothing, death or living, is certain; nothing is impossible. The raging infinity between zero and one keeps my brain from shutting up.

 

“He’ll have to work out that you and me survived,” Apollo says. “He’ll have to … sift what was left. Count the skulls.”

 

I pull on my other bootstrap. “Gives us a head start running, then.”

 

“It could give you the time you need to--”

 

“Lay off it! Our chances are better if we stick together.”

 

“You know that for a fact, do you?”

 

“Yes.” Our chances are still for the birds, but they’re better.

 

Apollo looks me in the eyes at last, grey in the moonlight. “I think you just like having me around.”

 

“Like I said. You’ve lost your mind.”

 

An hour arrives where the cold passes the point I’d thought was its worst, and even the moon hangs frozen. My body’s stiff and even my brain is slowing. I jam my hands into my pockets and stamp.

 

Apollo frowns. “You’re cold.”

 

“You’re smart.”

 

“Get over here.”

 

“You’re the one having the breakdown. I give the orders.” I glare at him.

 

“I radiate heat.”

 

“You shoot lightning bolts out of your ass. It’s different.”

 

Apollo gets up, and sits down beside me. He rubs his palms together and studies me, eyebrows raised. It works at once. All of sudden the air is air again, not the hail of knives I’ve been sucking into my lungs. The warmth is such a shock it hurts. I sigh my relief, then catch Apollo’s eye and restore a frown. “Some party trick,” I tell him.

 

“Wait til you see the bit with the lighting bolts.”

 

“I think you’re recovering.”

 

Apollo leans forward til his elbows rest on his knees. “We’re not going to get time to recover,” he says. “We’ve just got to go on.”

 

I look at him.

 

“Come on.” He spreads his palms. “It’s your soapbox. Be glad I’ve climbed aboard.”

 

I frown. “You’re faking.”

 

“Yeah,” says Apollo, “well, you too.”

 

I snort, and try to stop my thawing limbic functions from leaning my body toward him like a weed toward a sun-lamp. Now that the cold’s less shrill, my brain’s on edge about the dark. I can see Apollo, doing his nightlight routine, but beyond him the black’s as dense in every direction. So thick it presses on my eyeballs. My teeth chatter, and I swear under my breath.

 

“What’s wrong?” Apollo inclines his head at me.

 

“What kind of question is that?”

 

“Your teeth are chattering,” he says mildly.

 

I frown at him, then huff out a breath. Knock a fist once against my own chest. “Not supposed to be any involuntary impulses left in here.”

 

“Huh. Bendix told you that?”

 

I shake my head shortly. “I just knew it.”

 

Apollo nods. “You want to talk about it?”

 

“Have we  _ met _ ?”

 

He shrugs. “You don’t seem yourself.”

 

I grunt. He narrows his eyes at me. I deepen my frown, but he doesn’t let up. Fine. “It’s the desert,” I snap.

 

Apollo rests his jaw on one hand and gives me an inquiring look.

 

“I’m not … built for deserts,” I say into my hunched-up knees. “They fuck up the computer. Flat, empty – it’s no good for calculating probabilities. Every which way, everything looks the same.”

 

Apollo hikes an eyebrow. “Even to you?”

 

I scowl til the corners of my eyes ache.

 

“You’re sure you don’t want to talk?”

 

“You remember how many ways I know how to kill you?”

 

He grins at me. Screws up his own eyes and stares hard into the black. “Can you sleep?”

 

I shrug. “Used to think so.” For half a second the silence is static and I remember the precise crunch of the first bullet smashing bone. I shake my head. “I don’t need to sleep. Done with this night, that’s all.” I feel my adam's apple convulse.

 

Apollo nods. Still watching me, he stands. “Show you something.”

 

He’s faster than I thought. Even I don’t see him move toward me. Even my brain’s astonished, chattering numbers as the ground drops out from under my feet. Then we’re rising, and frozen air rushes so fast against me I can’t open my mouth, and Apollo’s arms grip so tight around my chest that I never even struggle. I’m dumb til we slow down, and then my brain lurches and my skull feels like eggshell. We lift soundlessly into the driftnet of stars. Beneath my feet, hundreds of yards beneath my feet, our outcropping’s just a handful of pebbles. From a distance we must look like a flare. I wonder when we’ll explode.

 

At twelve thousand feet up, we still. I gulp in air. “Flying under the radar, my ass.”

 

“Shut up.” Apollo’s voice rumbles where his chest presses against my back.

 

“Showing off takes your mind off it?”

 

“Shut  _ up _ and look.”

 

“What?”

 

“There. Look.”

 

“I feel like a Disney princess,” I object. But I look. Below us the black earth curves. And then I see it, opening in the east: a gold rift, splitting and growing wider, spilling light. Sunrise.

 

“You see it sooner from higher up.” Apollo is hauling in great lungfuls of the frozen air.

 

Dawn leaks across the desert. Far to the north it sets up a pale blue glow, something low and looming – a mountain range on the horizon. Away to the south-south west a mile-wide canyon yawns. The road that’s been ruling us is a thread no wider than the ones stitching up my back. I can all but see state boundaries dot-dotting across the sand.

 

“That help your navigation glitch?”

 

I kick Apollo’s shin with my heel, just hard enough to make him swear.

 

“Which way?” he asks.

 

I lift an arm, with his looped under it, and point. “That way.”

 

“Hoping you’d say that.” And Apollo aims us at the rising sun.


End file.
